Messages - HezaKey

Very work in progress, but I haven't checked in for awhile. Still pretty messy since I didn't want to polish off anything until I felt good about it.This time I have tiles for the cliffs and grass edges, another layer for tiling the shadows on the cliff side, and then the stairs and bridge sit on top of that.

Not much to say about it. Still trying to decide if I should have a third go at it or not. Most examples of cliffs from other games seem to either be extremely geometric, or extremely stylized, neither of which is what I want to go for stylistically.

I think these are almost working, but somehow I feel it could be better.

Kind of messed around with values some. Made the coaster darker. The fading into the distance just wasn't reading much at all, so I redrew that. I love that spiral, so I don't really want to see it go away.

Something about having a purple character on a purple background is still not working too great, but I couldn't decide on a good solution that wouldn't be a drastic recoloring of everything. And then it wouldn't really be a reflection of the vision that your trying to make. But it's already got complimentary (Purple vs yellow) and all that red, so I think you can get away with adding another color to your palette as well. Maybe green. A lot of ways to do it, but I think keeping to a defined color scheme will help keep you organized. Especially when adding in new pieces to it.

Didn't mess with your colors so much as your values. Throw the original and this under grayscale and you'll really see what I mean.Kind of messed around with the people's shirts, cause you have a cold color on a slightly warm green, they just don't pop out that much. Red might look better, but I'll let you decide on that.

*Rises from the crypt*I picked the project back up for a bit and tried to tackle that cliff problem.

I keep having the hardest time balancing out the geometric nature of tiling and also trying to make this look organic. Might try for some unique object (large roots and trees) to try and break it up some more.

Finally settled on a design for the Wolf King.

The Firemancer, who appears later.

I started planning and making notes, so the game now has a basic outline. It's also a nice way to keep track of all the things I have to draw since some of the areas are going to be very visually different from each other.

 Wolf King and the wolf shrine  Introducing the nature of your curse and meeting the dangers of the woods.

 Snake Ruins  Search for clues to the Snakemancers spells.

 Burning Forest and the troubles of the Firemancer  The Firemancer is burning the forest in an attempt to remove the cursed sigels.

 Phantom Lake Cliff  Crossing the uncrossable

 Reflections of the Crystal Forest  The Mirror Mancer, and just who is behind the cursed sigels?

 Ancient Forest of the Fauns  Discover more in the oldest lands of the endless forest.

 Mountain of the Bear people  The land of forever winter and the child of songs

 Necromancer/Dead Forest  A glimpse of the end, and the finality of the truth.

The Wolf King and the Snake Ruins are basically the same area, so there's about seven different areas to go through. So many drawings to do.

You are putting too much effort into your shading. Since the scale is so small, single pixels don't amount to much, so trying to do nuanced shading just amounts to a bunch of static.

You have to simplify the light and get it down to it's most basic aspects. Broad shapes of light and shadow, and well placed core shadows and highlights.

You don't have a lot of space to work with, so you want to have the readability of the image to be really high. Be spare with your colors, and try to use as few as possible. It's easier to add that reduce.

What if for an idle animation he was sort of shifting side to side with his knees bent, keeping his hands moving, alert and waiting for a fight.Or he could do some leg stretches, that might be neat too.

My initial observation is that your title image has very 3D letters, but flat as a pancake boards. Seeing the sides of the boards would really sell the whole image better I think.Since you already have them rounded, I'd do the left and right sides, as if the boards were curved instead of flat. But seeing any edge to suggest perspective would be good.

Thanks for the critique guys!I started paying attention more and realized I was missing a lot of foot movement, so I tried to address that.I also working on a left facing sprite. I need to something with the movement cloak yet, but I haven't figured out yet how best to attack that problem.

My gut says something is off, but I don't where or how things got off pace.Still a lot of stray pixels blinking on and off, but I want to be sure I have the movement spot on before doing hours of cleanup.